The illogical rhetoric of Share Alike

I wonder what sort of attention that title will bring? I’m actually rephrasing other people’s dismissal of my arguments regarding Share Alike… so please read on to get a clearer picture.

I have recently discovered the seemingly incurable headache of copyright ideology within the free content circles. I have a problem with Creative Commons Share Alike – or not so much a problem with the license, but a problem with a user generated content publishing platform that uses that license as its default and practically speaking its only workable option!

I’m talking about Wikieducator in this instance, but I guess my issues will apply to any platform using a copyleft legality. Copyleft as it turns out, seems to be a type of free and open copyright license that aims to grow free content. In otherwords, as the Share Alike plain English statement goes:

Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

So you should be able to see the intent of this. It is to stop free content becoming closed by third parties. It is a mechanism that some believe will grow free culture. But does it?

1. Our tertiary and vocational education institution is sometimes in a
training partnership with a business or industry that may require us to mix
learning content with commercially sensitive content (such as blue prints to
machinery, patented product designs, or anything that the partner still
perceives is necessary to remain restricted in access and copy). If we were
to mix any SA content with the partner’s content and redistribute (even on a
small scale) we would be expected by the SA content provider to re-release
the derivative under the SA license, but the partner would understandably
not want to do this because they perceive (rightly or wrongly) that doing so
would result in a loss of income and competative advantage. Result? We will
not mix SA content. To keep things simple, we will use SA content at all
because we will never be able to tell at what point we may find ourselves in
this position.

2. Our tertiary and vocational education institution works with a local
Maori Iwi (clan) named Ngai Tahu. At times we may be working with culturally
sensitive materials that the Ngai Tahu leaders prefer to restrict access and
copyrights to only Ngai Tahu people. We may wish to mix materials in with
that, [such as generic training resources on say – chainsaw maintenance, but with local context] but cannot re-release under SA because of the valid concerns of Ngai Tahu.
Replace the Ngai Tahu example with any culturally sensitive
group or individual and (rightly or wrongly doesn’t matter) we have the same
situation. SA is not usable.

3. We have a large database of materials created long before CC or copyleft
existed. Photographs, video and audio of people demonstrating things. These
people signed release forms for using their image and recording for specific
purposes, and the release did not mention anything about the right for a 3rd
party to remix. We can’t mix SA content with these recordings, because we
don’t have the right to re-release the derivatives under anything but a C or
CC BY No Derivatives – due to the old release contracts.

I want to make a strong reinforcement of what I am trying to say here. SA doesn’t work for educational content. Software is different, encyclopedic articles are different, the needs and purpose of education are very different to the success flags of free software and free reference materials. But I don’t expect that will be clearly understood unfortunately. The problem is compounded by a majority of education and elearning developers who – despite claims otherwise – think of educational content as text books and more or less static content. The 3 examples above are only 3 of many more I can think of, but hopefully it goes some of the way towards articulating where these differences lie.

Now, if you refer to the Wikieducator debate (largely between myself and one or two others, with the odd support for me) my efforts to articulate the issues are largely dismissed as illogical rhetoric. I am at a loss at to how it is rhetoric – or why people would think that I would want to use rhetoric or even want to have this argument! The 3 scenarios above are common, almost daily concerns for me and the people I work for – so how can it be rhetoric?.. I guess I need to get the people I try to represent to speak for themselves on this rather dense issue.. but the frustrating thing is that for anyone who works in my type of environment, these situations are obvious! Why my argument is illogical is of more of a concern however. Either I am missing some very important point in the counter arguments, or I am a very poor communicator when engaged in discussion lists. Which is probably why I am writing here now, in the relative comfort of my blog.

But I feel savaged! Listen to this surprise interview sprung on me by a Wikiversity participant. I joined the audio broadcast to listen to Alex Hayes talk, but when Alex didn’t show, the host turned the recorded mic on me. I knew the host had things to say about me and my arguments against copyleft in education, so I agreed to talk and brought the SA issue up – hoping to be enlightened somehow as to why my argument may be illogical or rhetorical. I didn’t expect the savage and unethical treatment though! I truly do not think these issues are being heard or properly considered. And that is why I think some proponents of copyleft hurt free culture.

Our organisation has a draft intellectual policy that is considering the use of the Creative Commons Attribution license. No link I’m sorry – so you’ll have to take my word for it. It is going through internal consultation at the moment. It is not considering the Non Commercial restriction – nor the Share Alike at this point, as it’s intent is to limit the restrictions on as much as possible, and see that we are contributing to educational development as widely as possible. In saying that though, the draft provides a mechanism for individuals and other stakeholders to place restrictions if they wish. They would have to fill out a one page form or something to indicate restrictions on a particular resource, and so the 3 situations I use above to argue why copyleft is impossible in same instances, can be catered for. CC BY content can be sampled, remixed and the derivative even made restricted if the user wishes (with proper attribution of course) but not the other CC licenses. At this point we are not concerned by possible cases of publishers benefiting from our works without giving back, we might be pleased that someone finds a way to make financial gains from our work, but we are also confident that our work will remain ahead, and more usable than restricted derivatives.

At this point I’d like to insert the personal belief that the legal mechanisms of Copyleft are not what grows free culture. As the All rights reserved sector experiences, there is not much that can be effectively done to prevent pirating and unsanctioned use of content, and so the same might be said for Copyleft. Dave Wiley’s story, and Steve Downes’ comment suggest that in some way too. (Certainly David’s article Why Universities Choose NC and what we can do about it shows an appreciation for the difficulties of winning institutional bye-in to free culture). I believe that free culture is growing from itself regardless of the SA and similar clauses. A quick look at Flickr’s Creative Commons database shows a preference for CC BY over CC BY SA by more than 1 million images. Of course I am guilty as always of over simplifying the issue with this little opinion, but I do think it might be an interesting consideration – that free culture is growing regardless of any legal mechanism. I wonder what other Creative Commons data bases reveal? In this age of information explosion, the competitive advantage goes to the content with less restriction. If the only restriction is the requirement for attribution, then I would bet that such a resource will be reused well before another with a restriction of some sort like share alike… and reuse brings attribution – possibly the only thing of worth with content these days.

Now if we start using the Wikieducator platform to develop resources, we have to accept the Creative Commons Share Alike license. A license that is considerably more restrictive than the Attribution license we are preferencing. For the 3 or more reasons outlines above we can not be comfortable with the Share Alike restriction, so using the Wikieducator Platform compromises the re-usability of the resources we contribute. Now, that would not be a problem for the original works, but some of us are actually thinking to use the wiki as a development platform! No more word documents, no more powerpoints, development straight into a wiki. We don’t have a wiki of our own (problems with IT on that) and one of our own doesn’t benefit from the collaborative potential of the more neutral and internationally reaching Wikieducator, Wikiversity etc. It makes more sense to join forces rather than reinvent wheels.

But the default and effectively only license option is a preventative concern. I believe that Wikieducator should use the CC BY license by default, with the option to turn something into SA if agreement can be struck by the contributors. At the moment SA is the default, with possible consideration of the idea that BY will be supported if the contributors to a particular resource agree. But that’s not workable. We need to start with a BY because BY can be turned into SA more readily – or a quick derivative made and turned into SA. This is much more difficult when going the other way. Which is precisely the intent behind Copyleft generally. To make it difficult to do anything other than share alike. And that finishes the impasse – that is not usable in many educational contexts we find ourselves in.

Unfortunately for the discussion, as evidenced by the discourse and treatment of my contributions linked above, the two perspectives don’t seem to be able to find an agreement let alone an appreciation of each other’s position. Shaggy from the TALO email list linked to some history in the debate and shows that it has been going on for longer than when I inadvertently joined the mosh. Now I want out – and will sadly have to reinvent a wheel so that it roles in a way that gets me and my organisation out of this copyright mud and into Open Educational Resources that are as reusable as WE need them to be. Hopefully the MediaWiki developers will find a way to bring the two wikis (ours and the rest 🙂 together in some way, so the shared vision of open educational resources can build and be reused quickly.

11 comments

[…] The illogical rhetoric of Share Alike CC BY content can be sampled, remixed and the derivative even made restricted if the user wishes (with proper attribution of course) but not the other CC licenses. At this point we are not concerned by possible cases of publishers … […]

I’m really impressed to see you taking this debate into the blog sphere – it is quite refreshing to see an Educator arguing for CC-BY in the free content movement. I agree with your concerns of “savage attacks” from the copyleft brigade – that’s an uncomfortable paradox. The philosophy underpinning copyleft is about freedom of choice – and copyleft advocates must respect the rights of others to choose their own licenses – including full copyright!

WikiEducator encourages and welcomes critical discourse as a community driven project. We have respected your candid challenges to the community and have responded by permitting dual licensing so that any content developer who wants to use the CC-BY license instead of CC-BY-SA on WikiEducator can do so. In my view, the inference suggesting a link between your “ideological headache” and WikiEducator is a tad unfair .

Both CC-BY and CC-BY-SA are licenses supported by the freedom movement as articulated in the free cultural works definition – and this is why WikiEducator has created opportunities for dual licensing – We respect your views and have done our best to support advocates of CC-BY.

We must also remember that there are members of the WikiEducator community who would argue the benefits of the CC-BY-SA license. I feel that we have an obligation to respect these views as well.

I’m not sure whether the views of Ngai Tahu have been adequately represented in this discourse. I have not seen contributions from te whanua Maori to this discourse, and I’m personally reluctant to express an opinion on what the cultural perspectives would be on free content licensing. For example:

* Would Ngai Tahu be comfortable with commercial exploitation of cultural texts released under CC-BY by a Pakiha company who packaged the cultural texts in a glossy publication under full copyright? This would be permissible as a derivative work where the source materials are licensed under CC-BY. I would argue that this scenario is less likely under CC-BY-SA for economic reasons. I cannot speak on behalf of Ngai Tahu – but I feel that its appropriate to put these questions to the Iwi to get their views on the subject.

I know that you’re a strong advocate of Web 2.0 technologies – and as an educator I know that these technologies hold huge potential for our learning futures.

An interesting observation – the fact that you posted these personal observations on a blog, denies me the freedom to to edit any of your assertions. The best I can do is to respond by means of a reply. In an educational context – your blog post can be perceived as the “truth” without democratic opportunities to adapt and modify the text. Now that’s how you have chosen to exercise your freedom of speech. Good on you! However, I’m restricted by adding my views to the source materials :-).

Put this kind of stuff on the wiki – so we all have the chance to add our bits in a democratic way.

The headache is not Wikieducator – it is copyright.
What is unfair in my view, is the misunderstanding and evident manipulation of what I am trying to say – especially with the Ngai Tahu example in the wikiversity recording. I wish now that I had of simply said culturally sensative groups and left it at that! As both wikieducator and wikiversity respondents have lept onto that one example and and missed the point. Unfortunately for me, I have used the Ngai Tahu example and may wind up in trouble for that, but I would very much prefer not to focus on that – rather the notion of culturally sensative groups. I hope that notion is easy to understand and I won’t be dismissed as rhetorical, because the issue remains even if I am not qulaified to speak for it! The concern that some people do not want to have their cultural artifacts remixed or even viewed publicly is the main thrust and as you agree, people should have the right to reserve that. Just like some commercial entities, and people who’s record was released under certain understandings of restrictions.

But you have focused on the Ngai Tahu example again, and missed the point I am trying to make with it. My wanting to avoid this specific example leads me to be accused of being meaningless and rhetorical, so round we go again…

The example you site of a Pakeha publisher is misunderstanding the issue! though after all that has been said – how can that be?

One last try:

Otago Polytechnic loads educational content for training = safe operation and maintenance of a chainsaw into wikieducator. Over time spelling mistakes are corrected, grammatical errors adjusted, decontextualisation so it is more reusable, and other edits an aditions by other Wikieducators who operate (maybe unknowingly) under CC BY SA..
A contract is offered to the Otago Polytechnic Aboriculture School to help train a community on the Peninsula in the safe use and maintenance of a chainsaw. The community partners would like to develop resources with a local flavour, using local faces, local stories, perhaps even local language, certainly respecting local values. Otago Polytechnic is unable to convince community reps to use a CC BY SA license because of issues perhaps to do with Tapu or simply a belief that the resource have monetary value to the community and should use a copyright restriction. Otago Polytechnic is now in a dilemma because its resources are CC BY SA by virtue of using the Wikieducator platform to develop their chainsaw materials. If Otago Polytechnic lecturers download the Wikieducator resources, contribute them into the combined project and print a book under the community’s restriction, they breach the copyrights of the other wikieducator contributors. If Otago material remains CC BY – this is not a problem. the fact that the derivative ends up restricted is not a problem either. It is the reusability of the source that matters. Dividing up the resource into discretely separate copyrights of source is not likely to be a practical measure.

Therefore, Otago Poly may well prefer to only maintain a repository of CC BY source content. Or not to compromise the flexibility of its content by developing it on wikieducator or any publishing platform that is CC BY SA.. even with the ability for editors to use CC BY in their profile – it would simply be too time consuming to manage, let alone train staff in! David Wiley covers it nicely from the NC side – but the comments in that blog post highlight it better.

I respect Wikieducator’s decision to use the CC BY SA. It is a democratic decision after all, and the intention is to grow free content and protect the copyright concerns of some of the participants. I admit to being dissapointed at not seeing a wider discourse and the misunderstanding and poor treatment of the issues I raise by a few copyleft proponents.

I post to my blog because a discourse through blogging is my preferred communication technique. I regret entering into conversation via a forum and would hope that we may spread this issue and dialogue further by talking more in the open across multiple blogs with stronger individual identity, rather than the considerably more faceless email forums. It is I that has more to lose by bringing this out of that forum and onto my blog. My online indentity is affected by it considerably more…

I think the main way forward on this is for Otago Polytechnic to set up its own wiki that accommodates the range of rights and restrictions it needs to operate. Somehow, the content that is CC BY can be automatically sampled and used by Wikieducator if they like, but we will not be able to use the Wikieducator derivatives that appear under SA. Not a problem, we may be prepared to wear that loss if it means we maintain maximum flexibility in our own resources.

Of course, the draft IP policy penned here may not even gain wings. Nay sayers may catch a wiff of this long and difficult debate and use it as some shallow reason to reject the CC BY clause in the draft, or any attempt to develop OER. Jeez, that’d suck.

I think we should begin to focus on the technical way in which an Otago Poly Wiki might inter operate with Wikieducator (and others). Hopefully wikieducator can work out an easier fix to the problem we might have in reusing SA materials from Wikieducator.

Once again, it is the statement that “SA does not work for education” is the part that I would describe as “rhetoric” and fallacious, based on the arguments I made above. Unfortunately, you keep repeating that rhetoric. 😦

I don’t consider most of your remaining arguments illogical, but they are based on different hypotheses about the growth of free culture and its incentive models, as well as your specific short term needs.

There are scenarios where we will want to support CC-BY as a licensing standard within WikiEducator. This goes for imported resources and initiatives which aim for maximum distribution. But, based on our discussion, my conviction has strengthened that CC-BY-SA is a reasonable default, especially when individual users have the option to multi-license.

I think the Ngai Tahu example is a good one because it encourages discussion beyond the standard commercial versus non-commercial debate we usually find in free content within education circles. I have yet to see this level of deliberation – so good on you for raising the debate. Based on the principles of freedom of speech – there are no grounds whatsoever for “getting into trouble” – its a damn good example for us to explore real issues of freedom beyond the rhetoric of copyright.

There are certainly cases where authors and creators would want to share their works – but not permit remixing. Cultural artifacts and works of art are good examples. In such cases we should respect the creator’s rights to add a no-derivatives restriction. I don’t think that CC-BY is necessarily the best way to achieve these objectives – but that’s open to discussion.

I don’t think David Wiley’s example is relevant in this deliberation. David is arguing that when working with a conservative academic community – it’s better to take small steps, and eventually the academy will see the light that free content licenses are better than non-free content licenses. (Remember the NC restriction in CC results in a non-free license.)

Erik raises the important point about differences in the underlying hypothesis of growth of the freedom culture. Your example of commercialization enabled by CC-BY is based on classical economic thinking rooted in the law of diminishing returns and how corporates compete on the quality and cost differentials within a finite market.

However, there is a new market proposition emerging on the knowledge economy which derives market value from mass-collaboration and self-organization. The biggest challenge for free content in education is sustainability. Paradoxically copyleft promotes economic sustainability – its viral. The successful corporates of the future will be those that understand and embrace these new market propositions – innovating new ways of doing business. CC-BY-SA does not restrict a company from packaging and selling a resource – even when they want to add their own examples. An old style company would lock down their additions under a dual license arrangement. A new style company won’t and will release their modifications under copyleft – because this will feed new business opportunities through mass-collaboration. Successful corporates operating in this new world understand that they compete through value added services which extend beyond the content – for example, learner support. Copyleft strengthens the evolution chain and long term sustainability of free content in education. CC-BY weakens the evolution chain.

From a strategic management perspective, in my view, it would be useful for OP to develop economic modeling scenarios under different licensing scenarios and to map these against the strategic objectives of the institution. From an economic perspective – I’m less optimistic that we can build sustainable models from CC-BY that meet the core values and responsibilities associated with education.

OP has the freedom to set up their own wiki and if this is the most productive way forward to ensure wide-scale adoption of free content authoring in your institution – you must go for it. We will continue to find ways of collaborating to ensure sustainable growth of free content. The downside is the challenge of establishing the critical mass to carry a project like this forward. The success of projects like this is community, community community!

Eric, you are right. I should say SA doesn’t work for Otago Polytechnic – not education. On refelection I think I did mean OP, but was arrogant enough to think that OP = education, when clearly that is less and less the case, as more and more self organised learning occures via the Internet and other networks. It wil only be a matter of short time before credentials can be obtained through these more informal ways of learning!

But I think that the reasons SA doesn’t work for Otago Poly would be shared by most educational institutions today, so maybe I could say SA doesn’t work for most educational institutions at the moment for the following 3 reasons and more….

Wayne, I think the crux of the issue is not which free culture license works best, but that support for ALL copyright licenses is the best next step for corporates and institutions at the moment. At the moment, most corporates and institutions are comfortable with the default of All rights reserved, and pay big momey to agencies to manage the payments for using restricted content. Most corporates are not even aware of the Creative Commons licenses, let alone the GPL etc – it is certainly not in the interests of the copyright payment agencies to inform them… yet!

So if we end up setting up our own wiki platform it will be one that allows for all copyright statements. It sounds like I contradict myself, but for the following idea I think not: I imagine that authors to our wiki will be prompted for a copyright statement. They will have all the options presented to them, with strong support and encouragement for free culture compatibility. Encouragement may include access to extra functionality in the resource, wider distribution features, reusability features etc. Ristricting a resource for example might result in all these options being greyed out! and even a red box around it to show it is restricted. Underneath every page will be the default statement from the Institution that offers the platform, “…unless specifically indicated otherwise, all resources here are licensed CC BY. If you reuse any resources under CC BY, please attribute authorship in the following way…”

Maybe I am going too far with imagining ways to “support and encourage” adoption of free cultural exchange, a red box around restricted work would be quite a discouraging thing, but I hope you get what I mean… the crux (for an educational organisation trying to move forward) is not which free culture license works the best, but in simply enabling the expression of free cultural intent, and then hoping for the growth. I am confident that with the growing free culture agencies and massive resource databases, that free culture is growing with or without the legal machanisms that ensure it. Maybe I’m naive…

Just for context, your arguments do not show that licensing for educational content is different from licensing for software. Lots of people, institutions, companies (SAKAI…) object to the GPL for the same reasons that you do (ok, well, there is no aboriginal tradition of software to worry about). I guess by some measures GPL seems to dominate free software, but there are many, many, many important software projects that are closer to CC-BY than CC-BY-SA (BSD…).

I see now what you are advocating – a Wiki site that enables the users to choose among the full range of CC licenses. This is similar to the approach used by the Creative Commons website where the users select which license they want to release their materials under including the non-free licenses that do not meet the requirements of the free cultural works definition. I can see why this will be attractive to academic institutions – particularly among more conservative academics and teachers.

That’s very different to adopting a generic CC-BY license for the institution.

WikiEducator subscribes to licensing that meets the requirements of the free cultural works definition and we are unable to entertain non-free licenses in this specific project. Our vision is to build a free version of the curriculum in response to the millions of people in the developing world who do not have the luxury of access to education.

There will certainly be opportunities for us to collaborate on free content in our respective projects and I look forward to working with you and the OP in this area.

[…] richness, unless I open each posting individually to read the comments. I also enjoyed the reading The Illogical Rhetoric of Share-Alike, which was linked to from one of the readings. (It’s interesting how blog posts are so much […]

[…] The rhetoric about freedom and moralistic argument in OER amps up non-the-less. We fail to see that we are loosing our freedom as it relates to effective and efficient educational practice. Not to mention the role we play in assisting with the erosion and missed opportunities in Fair Use and Fair Dealings. […]

[…] The rhetoric about freedom and moralistic argument in OER amps up non-the-less. We fail to see that we are loosing our freedom as it relates to effective and efficient educational practice. Not to mention the role we play in assisting with the erosion and missed opportunities in Fair Use and Fair Dealings. […]